Reading #145

Reflections on TRADOC’s Analysis of the Yom Kippur War (pages 220-225)

“… Seven thousand miles away the Arabs attacked Israel in October 1973. Within a few weeks, General Abrams dispatched me and BG Bob Baer to Israel. There, Bob and I walked battlefields with the IDF Commanders who had fought on them, seeking answers to many questions about the future U.S. Army. … Answers to those questions framed the beginning of what grew into, some nine years later, the doctrine called AirLand Battle, a concept of war at the tactical and operational levels that the U.S. and coalition commanders employed in Operation Desert Storm.”

General Donn A. Starry

Team,

The U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command’s capstone international engagement is the Future Battlefield Annual Talks (FBAT), held each year with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). This important learning event has roots in TRADOC’s earliest interactions with the IDF Ground Forces following the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Those engagements, and study of the war led by GEN Donn Starry, contributed to development of the U.S. Army’s AirLand Battle Doctrine and the “Big 5”.
FBAT remains the most significant and comprehensive U.S. Army bilateral engagement with the IDF. Led by CG, TRADOC and the Commander of the IDF Ground Forces, FBAT brings together Center of Excellence (CoE) Commanders, branch school commandants and their Israeli counterparts to explore a wide range of issues relevant to Army Warfighting Challenges, emerging concepts, capabilities development, science and technology, and R&D. TRADOC will host the 26th FBAT at our centers of excellence and Fort Eustis from 4-8 June 2017. The plenary session will focus on Multi-Domain Battle, with emphasis on the cyber domain, Russia New Generation Warfare, and the network.

This week’s professional reading is an excerpt from Volume 1 of “Press On, Selected Works of General Donn A. Starry” to highlight how thinking and learning about future armed conflict requires careful consideration of threats, enemies, and adversaries, anticipated missions, emerging technologies, and historical observations and lessons learned. Those considerations are sometimes derived from studying the outcomes of battles fought by our allies and partners.

In GEN Starry’s “Reflections on TRADOC’s Analysis of the Yom Kippur War, The Jaffee Center Military Doctrine Joint Conference, Israel, 16 March 1999”, he describes the convergence of events that helped to reshape the U.S. Army following the Vietnam War. There was a lack of attention paid to major combat during the 1960s when the U.S. Army’s focus was firmly on the war in Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, the defense of Western Europe from the many armored and mechanized divisions of the Warsaw Pact was another problem altogether with the diversion of resources for operations in Vietnam. When the U.S. Army finally disengaged from that protracted fight, it became clear that its Cold War adversary, the Soviet Army, had modernized. It was equally clear that major changes were needed within the U.S. Army. In October 1972, GEN Creighton Abrams was appointed Chief of Staff and embarked on the mission to rehabilitate his Service for the post-Vietnam era. A significant milestone in this effort was the stand-up of TRADOC on 1 July 1973.

Just three months later, on 6 October 1973, the Yom Kippur War began when an Arab coalition launched a joint surprise attack on Israeli positions in the occupied territories of the Sinai and Golan Heights. Although it was not the Soviets themselves, but their equipment and tactics employed by Syrian and Egyptian allies, the lessons were clear. According to GEN Starry in a speech to the TRADOC Historians Conference on 17 January 1989, “soon laid out for all to see were lessons of the Yom Kippur War: the staggering density of the battlefield at critical points; the presence on both sides of large numbers of modern weapon systems; the increased criticality of command and control; the increased likelihood of interrupted command and control due to large numbers of sophisticated electronic warfare means; the inability of any single weapon system to prevail, reaffirming the essentiality of all arms combat; the outcome of battle reflecting, more often than not, factors other than numbers”. In a Letter to Cadet Marty D’Amato dated 10 April 1998, entitled “AirLand Battle Determinants”, GEN Starry goes on to say, “the Israeli influence on AirLand Battle can scarcely be ignored. For it was their open and generous sharing of IDF lessons from the Yom Kippur War against Soviet-style echeloned formations that vividly demonstrated what we had to do.”

We can draw parallels to the early days of TRADOC. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in April 2016, LTG McMaster’s statement hearkened to the early 1970s when he said, “It is clear that while our Army was engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq, Russia studied U.S. capabilities and vulnerabilities and embarked on an ambitious and largely successful modernization effort”. Now, as the U.S. Army addresses lessons from Russia’s New Generation Warfare and begins to explore its next warfighting concept, Multi-Domain Battle, and the capabilities required to execute it, TRADOC continues to illustrate that it’s a learning organization that drives change in the U.S. Army.

#1Develop Situational Understanding:

How to develop and sustain a high degree of situational understanding while operating in complex environments against determined, adaptive enemy organizations.

#2Shape the Security Environment:

How does the Army influence the security environment and engage key actors and local/regional forces in order to consolidate gains and achieve sustainable security outcomes in support of Geographic Combatant Commands and Joint requirements.

#4Adapt the Institutional Army and Innovate:

How to improve the rate of innovation to drive capability development and deliver DOTMLPF-P solutions to the warfighter at a pace that meets operational demand within the existing constraints of the acquisition and budgeting processes.

#5Counter Weapons of Mass Destruction:

How to prevent, reduce, eliminate, and mitigate the use and effects of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and high yield explosives (CBRNE) threats and hazards on friendly forces and civilian populations.

How to assure access to and integrity of critical data and information, across multiple domains, in an increasingly contested and congested operational environment, while simultaneously denying the same to the enemy.

#8Enhance Realistic Training:

How to train Soldiers, leaders and units to ensure they are prepared to accomplish the mission across the range of military operations while operating in complex environments against determined, adaptive enemy organizations.

#9Improve Soldier, Leader, and Team Performance:

How to develop resilient Soldiers, adaptive leaders, and cohesive teams committed to the Army professional ethic that are capable of accomplishing the mission in environments of uncertainty and persistent danger.

#10Develop Agile and Adaptive Leaders:

How to develop agile, adaptive, and innovative leaders who thrive in conditions of uncertainty and chaos and are capable of visualizing, describing, directing, and leading and assessing operations in complex environments and against adaptive enemies.

#11Conduct Air-Ground Reconnaissance and Security Operations:

How to conduct effective air-ground combined arms reconnaissance and security operations to develop the situation rapidly in close contact with the enemy and civilian populations.

#12Conduct Joint Expeditionary Maneuver and Entry Operations:

The Army needs formations that can rapidly deploy into contested environments, quickly transition to operations, and be sustained to maintain high operational tempo with the overmatch necessary to destroy or defeat enemy forces.

#13Conduct Wide Area Security:

How do Army forces establish and maintain security across wide areas (wide area security) and across multiple domains to protect forces, populations, infrastructure, and activities necessary to shape security environments, consolidate gains, and set conditions for achieving policy goals.

How to integrate joint, inter-organizational, and multi-national partner capabilities and campaigns to ensure unity of effort and accomplish missions across the range of military operations.

#15Conduct Cross-Domain Maneuver:

How Army forces, operating as part of a joint, interorganizational, and multinational force, train, organize, equip, and posture sufficiently to deter or defeat highly capable peer threats in the degraded, contested, lethal, and complex future operational environment.

#16Set the Theater Sustain Operations and Maintain Freedom of Movement:

How to set the theater, provide strategic agility to the joint force, and maintain freedom of movement and action during sustained and high tempo operations at the end of extended lines of communication in austere environments.

#17Employ Cross-Domain Fires:

How to employ cross-domain fires to defeat the enemy and preserve freedom of action across the range of military operations (ROMO).

#19Exercise Mission Command:

How to understand, visualize, describe, and direct operations consistent with the philosophy of mission command to seize the initiative over the enemy and accomplish the mission across the range of military operations.

#20Develop Capable Formations:

How to design Army formations capable of rapidly deploying and conducting operations for ample duration and in sufficient scale to accomplish the mission.

Continuous feedback, collaboration, and teamwork are keys to the success of the Campaign of Learning and driving innovation in the Army. Please use the Army Warfighting Challenges as the framework to contribute your ideas and recommendations with respect to this topic to improve our ability to innovate as we develop the current and future force.

The Army Warfighting Challenges (AWFC) framework may be accessed here: